How video strategy impacts awareness

Tumblr dedicated page to interact with users; GIFs and real-life images to make the character closer to the public watching the movie.

Strategy – general

Only music and written text accompany the images of the trailer for the first 25 seconds, then “real life” kicks in. A last question closes the trailer, leaving the story open for a reply: “What do you wanna do?”. A car drives towards the horizon on a sunny road in the middle of nowhere, looking for the same answers the spectator of the movie will search for alongside the main character.

The film has a dedicated Tumblr site on which it posts mostly visual content. GIFs represent a large part of the content uploaded on Tumblr and they represent things users can relate to from their own childhood, such as playing ‘Snake’ on the Nokia 3310, trading Pokemon cards or watching the Simpsons. The official Facebook page has over 290k fans and follows the same strategy of posting mostly image based content and quotes from both the movies and the actors or director.

Statements and hidden questions during the trailer and the hashtag #MarchOn are used to encourage engagement, drawing a connection with current political activism in Martin Luther King’s legacy.

Strategy – general

The full trailer depicts the story’s climax and is accompanied by written statements and rap / hip-hop music to underline people’s anger, while drawing a connection with current fights for equality. Commentators quote the latest incident of police brutality in the US, some wearing the “I can’t breathe” statement t-shirt to the cinema. Written quotes between the trailer images encourage user debate and the trailer closes showing the hashtag #MarchOn.

The social content strategy cleverly exploits Facebook’s timeline function and creates a chronology going back to the 1960s, featuring events such as protests against racism, the Vietnam war and so on, until recent marches against homophobia.

The long period of time of 4 months (112 days) between publication of the trailer and official movie release was used to build audience and buzz around the movie, especially evolving around the main actor, Eddie Redmayne, and real-life Stephen Hawking.

Strategy – general

It all starts and ends with the universe, the subject of Hawking’s studies. YouTube users commenting on the trailer mostly discuss fate, illness, the real Stephen Hawking and, most of all, the existence of God. The movie’s epilogue, though, seems to lie in the stars – those loved and studied by the cosmologist, those that put everything into a bigger perspective, those closing the movie trailer.

To maintain the early interest in the title, the studio released content which included Hawking reviewing the movie – through interviews and special features – and updated movie trailers of a variety of lengths. This brought genuine authenticity and endorsement to the film.

The trailer’s editing and split title reflect the same angst the main character experiences in the movie; the objective is to confuse the viewer in a kaleidoscope of schizophrenic scenes from “Birdman” or “The unexpected virtue of ignorance”.

Strategy – general

The main character asks himself ” How did we end up here? This place is horrible”. The title is split: “Birdman” or “The unexpected virtue of ignorance” displaying multiple personalities just like the main character, on stage and in real-life, dreams vs. reality. Users don’t always appreciate this split, they see the trailer as a “mess”, but many are intrigued.

Hashtags like #BirdmanSays bring cartoon-like quotes from the character closer to the users. A rich-media microsite is used to host the trailer, requiring the user’s active interaction via keyboard to show a cascade of words forming a sentence.

Click here to download the full infographic and here for part one of our Oscars analysis.

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